Well, everyone else seems to post con reports, so I'm going to try my hand at one for ArmadilloCon 27.

As I've said in earlier posts, this was my first science fiction and fantasy convention, as a reader or a writer, and it was definitely a unique experience for me.

First off, the organizers of the writing workshop and the con did great jobs, and I applaud their efforts to make guests and fans as comfortable and happy as possible. (I thought the writing workshop was quite fun and educational, and my earlier post addresses my experience with the workshop in more detail.)

Overall, I enjoyed the con, but I have to admit that if I had not spent a considerable amount of time chatting with Josh Rountree, his wife, and, to a lesser extent, Mikal Trimm, about non-reading and non-writing topics in the hotel lobby, I would have been bored more often than not. I'm not a fan sort of fellow; I just don't get into such things to the extent that true enthusiasts do. I enjoyed meeting people, whether guest writers and artists or fan attendees, but I'm not the type to go lurk around authors like Martha Wells and Charles de Lint whose work I enjoy a lot; they get plenty of such attention from others, and they don't need more from me. The panels on the writing process or publishing business interested me, but fan-oriented panels held no such appeal. I sat through a panel exploring who would win if monkeys warred with dinosaurs with Joe Lansdale, Howard Waldrop, and several other excellent authors that was tear-inducingly funny, but that was Josh's idea. Josh and I also attended a panel on finishing novels that almost managed to inspire me to write a novel, but the urge passed quickly. I really am a poetry/short fiction writer at heart.

I did get a chance to meet and talk with some really nice people, including Andrew Fox, author of Fat White Vampire Blues, who was unbelievably gracious enough to sit through my reading of flash and poetry at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday. (So, did Josh and his wife, my two other listeners, and I owe them all many thanks for their support.) I had a chance to talk with Jim Minz of Del Rey and Josh about football (Josh now has an enormous incentive to finish one of his novels, but I'll let him share the news about that), with Wil McCarthy about writing outside of the hard science fiction subgenre, with Julie Kenner about practicing law and writing, with Deborah Lane about Wheatland Press, and with Rick Klaw about editing webzines.

My two panels, "Good Weird Fiction" and "The Rewards of Electronic Publication" were interesting, although "Good Weird Fiction" was by far the best attended, largely due to the entertaining (and dominating) presences of Joe Lansdale and Jim Minz. My main contribution to that panel involved naming some rising female authors of "weird fiction," such as Dora Goss, Sonya Taaffe, Sandra McDonald, and M. Thomas. (There are many others like Samantha Henderson who I didn't get a chance to name in the tiny gap of time I seized.) The electronic publishing panel was rather disorganized and sparsely attended, but I enjoyed meeting my fellow panelists, Jayme Lynn Blaschke of Revolution SF, Elizabeth Burton of Zumaya Publishing, and author Joan Upton Hall.

I mentioned Lone Star Stories at various appropriate points on my con panels and at other times as well, and I'll be curious to see if I receive any website visits and submissions as a result.

To sum up, I enjoyed myself, but I'm not going to start looking for excuses to attend cons outside of Austin.